CoolPad Cool Play 6 Review

After a period of hibernation, CoolPad caught up with the dual camera trend and launched a mid-ranger dubbed as Cool Play 6. Another selling point of this smartphone is its 6GB RAM. As of now, CoolPad Cool Play 6 is the cheapest 6GB RAM smartphone in the market retailing at Rs. 14,999 exclusively on Amazon India. The company has also promised to offer Android 8.0 update by December 2017. So is this mid-ranger worth investing? Let’s find it out.

Unboxing

Box contents

Coolpad Cool Play 6

Wall adapter (5V-2A)

USB Type-C Cable

Scratch guard

SIM Ejector

Display, Design, and hardware

The Cool Play 6 sports a 5.5-inch (1920×1080 pixels) Full HD IPS display translating to 403 ppi. The display is bright enough but looks washed out when setting brightness slider to maximum. The sunlight legibility also takes a hit with average visibility when it comes to outside environment.

The viewing angles are decent though. When it comes to design, the Cool Play 6 looks exactly like Cool 1 smartphone without much change in it. It has the same flat panel, black bezels on the sides with the chromed out rim at the edges. The front of the phone sports capacitive buttons below it that lights up when touched. Just above the screen, we have 8MP front camera with f/2.2 aperture, an earpiece and the usual set of proximity and ambient light sensors. It also has magnetic sensor (magnetometer) and gyroscope so you can use the phone with VR headsets.

Moving to the right we have the usual volume rocker keys, power button and on the left, we have the access to Dual SIM (nano + nano) slot. Up top, we just have a 3.5mm audio jack and at the bottom, it gets real busy with USB Type-C port and a speaker grill on the right side and microphone on the left.

Flipping it back, you can see the metal back with plastic end caps at the top and bottom. On the top, we have a dual camera module with dual LED flash and a circular fingerprint scanner just below it. The device measures 152.4×75.2×8.45mm and weighs around 175g, which heavy due to huge 4000mAh battery.

Software

The CoolPad Cool Play 6 is shipped with Android 7.1.1 Nougat with Journey UI on top. Moreover, the company has also promised an upgrade to Android 8.0 as well. The lock screen showcases all the notifications if enabled, and on the right-hand corner is the camera shortcut. Swiping up gives you the access to the home screen.

As it lacks the app drawer, all the apps are placed on the home screen itself. The notification panel can be accessed by swiping down the screen from the top. However, deleting the notifications might frustrate you at times. If you want to delete the notification, you need to swipe it right and have to select Delete.

Under the display option, you get four modes — normal, vivid, natural and eye care mode. You can also turn on the toggle for adaptive brightness if you need.

With this phone, you also get native phone manager app, that lets you optimize the phone by cleaning the junk, managing battery, and scanning for virus. It also comes with App freezer app that lets you freeze/disable the unused app to save memory. You can add apps just by tapping on “+” icon and unfreeze it by tapping on “-” icon. You can also turn on the Auto Freeze, so that system will freeze the unused app automatically. Additionally, it comes with utility apps including Transfer. Recorder, Backup, Weather and its native video player.

Talking about the storage, the Cool Play 6 comes with 64GB of inbuilt storage out of which, the user will get around 51GB free and out of 6GB RAM, the user will get around 4.6GB RAM free on first boot. It doesn’t have a microSD expansion slot.

Camera

The Coolpad Cool Play 6 sports a 13MP dual rear camera cameras with dual-tone LED flash, f/2.0 aperture, and PDAF. On the front, the device is taken care of 8MP camera with f/2.2 aperture.

Talking about the picture quality, the rear camera offers pretty decent images under daylight condition. The Bokeh shots are decent if not amazing, whereas the software struggles to locate definite edges as well. The front camera also is pretty decent for a selfies and video calling.

Check out the camera samples (Click the image for full resolution samples)

Depth enabled

Performance

The Coolpad Cool Play 6 is powered by an Octa Core Snapdragon 653 (Quad 1.95GHz ARM Cortex A72 + Quad 1.44GHz A53 CPUs) Mobile Platform with Adreno 510 as GPU. In case of multitasking, this smartphone comes with 6GB of RAM. Talking about the performance, the Cool Play 6 gives us a smooth, lag-free experience and literally performs all the task we throw at it. During gameplay also, we didn’t observe any frame drop or slowdowns. But playing intense games for a long time warms the phone a bit. Overall, it’s a thumb up for the performance factor. Check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.

Connectivity, Music Player and FM Radio

When it comes to connectivity, it supports a usual set of options including 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4GHz and 5GHz), Bluetooth 4.1, USB 2.0 Type-C. It has 4G connectivity with support a lot of bands and also has Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) support for Reliance Jio. It also comes with native music player and FM radio as well. The loud-speaker quality is decent at lows and mids, but gets muffled when the volume is full. Audio through headphones is good.

Battery

The Coolpad Cool Play 6 is juiced with 4060mAh battery under the hood, which can take you through a day of usage with ease.

In our one charge rating, it achieved around 15 hours and 46 minutes, mainly due to brilliant talk time results. It takes around 2 hours 42 mins for charging full and from 0 to 50% in 1 hour and 4 minutes. Check out the complete set of battery life test results here.

Conclusion

The CoolPad Cool Play 6 definitely offers an all rounding package with a decent display, battery efficient processor, 6GB RAM, above average camera and huge 4060mAh battery. At Rs. 14,999, this Cool Play 6 is definitely a bang for the buck. It is available exclusively from Amazon.in.